***"...there is such a single-minded purity in her tone and images, living speech which transcends the familiar anguish of the neurotic to take on the blaze and exhilariting candor of one who totally accepts her fate; who, touching rock bottom, rises like phoenix. Wife, mother, poet, all that she was, none of that can compete with her cold, fierce destiny, a world where 'the mirrors are sheeted' and 'fixed stars/Govern a life'. Crossing the Water, a collection of poems written just prior to those in Ariel, while not as astonishing as Sylvia plath's last classic volume, is, nevertheless of immense importance in recording her extraordinary development. One senses on every page a voice coming into its own, the chaos of a lifetime at last getting ready to assume its final, thriumphant shape." -- Kirkus Reviews, 1971--

"...these poems are uniquely transitional. The intense control and the maturity found here are not matched in the earlier, youthful Colossus or in the later, tortured Ariel. This short middle period gives us Plath at her most sophisticated and skilled; there are even occasional flashes of humor and tenderness. But the movement in the final poems os inexorably toward Ariel, away from a somewhat detached vision of likeness [similes abound in the bulk of the poems] to the chaotic power of identity, to the kind of oneness that either destroys or saves the self. The cult feeds on the poet's pathology, loves her risks and her most daring, Ariel poems. Calling Crossing the Water Plath's finest collection might be heresy and is probably wrong; as usual, it would surely say as much about the reader as the poet." -- Antioch Review, 1972